Jonnie Largo

Share my sickness, sing with faith in me
Pray for my hands and see what I've done
The crane that used to love me wants me dead now
I recite my song and I've earned my keep
Step away when you remember all I've said
I will keep your prayers with me
Don't scream, go, and leave
To earn a smile there are only so many things

I fiend for warmth at the back of daylight
Comfort I accept only in pints of blood
I fend for myself with the finest of shovels
I almost always swim in a pond of spoiled wine
Cranberries I crave too, in the sundown
There is almost always time

the endless room
without a single door

I need to live in room where only my favorite things. Perhaps I bring a person I like, and we could both rejoice in the things I love together. For breakfast we will have blueberries. I might even pop a cherry inside my cherished person's mouth for breakfast if I want to. For lunch we will light the cigarette I always buy and when supper comes I breathe their air 'cause I don't have any. When my cherished person is sad we will play my favorite songs on a guitar I don't know how to tune.

Somehow, somewhere along wishing to be in a place where there only exists my favorite things I've held hands with a dirty door k**b. Saliva pools at the side of my mouth whilst waiting for the door to stop waiting for me. It should know that I am here. Only when I shut my eyes did it acknowledge that I am a sheep feasting over flies. Blind. I fly to the endless room and I ever so quietly, so politely, close the door.

Humor my endless whimsy
Dance, when I do
On a pale morning, when sickles are bright
After we drink our babe dead
I will balance a foot on a knife
Watch the ashen flightless birds
Run left when they don't
You will find my lace there
Begging for rot in a bone

I warned myself. That if this road does not bow to me then I am to turn back and forsake all that lies ahead. But my toes curl at the simple thought of backing away. I warned myself. Now all I do is suffer, with no reward.

I sit without clothes to save me from the cold. I swing my feet without shoes to break what will be my inevitable fall. I have done many things and I have been to places the heavens have never seen but I have not been loved by time and I have never been inside my heart.

The bark of the flowering tree of pink wounds me, even if only superficial. It is as if the tree grew claws, with a temper to match. I rest my head on a branch that only started to bite. It didn't give away with the weight of my head. I mumble my thanks and bid it good night.

I have never been good at video games. I have never been good. Sometimes I like to think that is true. There is no future to hold when life is a big tower of sour champagne; it has lost its scintillant allure from childhood, when butterflies amazed me for their wings were as frail as my legs and birds I chased for the stories they say are secrets. Sour champagne spoils the stomach that holds my name.

And although in my life I've never drank, I imagine the troubles spoiled champagne will add into a fairly ordinary life. A fairy ordinary life of suffering in the pits where people are shocked, enduringly, and never sleep. A life spent in the worse corners of the worst liquor stop with a quarter of a sound mind to spare. This is why I have stuck to downing strawberry ades, with their cheetah print umbrellas in a small glass stage.

Strawberries are as red as the blush of my bones. They carry the weight of the hands that have held mine before. They are juicy, red, and they are ripe. They have never let me down save when they rot or need cutting down.

No ants dare flood the ropes that once hung the saint of the family who dine in a high-ceilinged tent of a grave lined with dirt that never dries. The tarnished purple and the white of it all honors Cici, whose last words were the colors that make my young humorless life. Cici passed when she has only begun to discover what it means to wear gold against green. She was my dearest young aunt.

Only at dinner does the dirt leave. Smiles are worn and a plump chicken with salted butter for sheen makes the meal. Even the earth is too scared to invite themselves and find out who lies and what awaits, to surround themselves with them who devoured an unmarred maiden of heavenly virtues so that she leaves the ghost of the woman she was. For her to live in the shadows. With theirs. With mine.

The seventeenth cigarette from a deep green pack almost always conjures her wholesome face if not her slightly slanted eyes, or her ever pale lips. As for the last cigarette, the twenty-first one, it makes this: I, with my mouth full and my stained fork reflecting the scrambled face of my father's older sister.

Clear soups broken out of old fowl, and more ginger than what is used in the stewed fish across, accompany imaginings of filling the lines of her mouth that never shuts up. I may fill it with the tadpoles that plague shallow waters nearby. I may stitch her wrinkles taut so she may scream at my father, forever, with what thread I can spare. I have never been able to scream at my father. I will never be older. I will never find the voice that can demean his all, and mean it.

I have learned that silence is the best wine to pair with anything, after so many nightly breaks of bargained fasts over so many deals on money and collars over family. Especially damp ci******es I break my fingers to light as it rains. It never does catch the fire on the first try, and it smells worse than poorly made coffin nails do — the ones sold per piece in once-cookie jars which my mother brought from the town under when she first came. Little spats were few when my mother was around, I'm told. No one was red around the nose.

My mother never does come now. She mother is a married woman without a ring. The silver bands they commuted once in a fable so far away were lost when a kindly fellow came knocking and took them, but not for free. Duck and rigs and gin were free for all the day after, and the following morning, but when dinner knocked there was only rice and salt to have, water to drink, and blueline sweets to smoke. I have learned then that wedding rings and wives are goods that pay and pay well, and that I should decide carefully whether to drink gin or to have supper.

When I am at last out of money to afford myself even a short stick, in the future, I will marry the first man I see, I promised myself. It doesn't matter that he is without gold, cattle, or mother. We will ride the ferry using the perfume Cici gave me. We will run towards the hill where my family and his are nought. I will marry him in front of anyone but the man that is the making of me. We will celebrate with young wine. On the day of the next year's first storm I will sell him for one more draft of gray smoke.

And so I married the wealthiest man I know with golden rings for us both. We indeed rode the ferry and we rode a cart to town and ran up the hills. Then it came. It came in March one fateful night, that storm. My man was making a cow out of an awkward spinning wheel outside while I made jowls sing in fermented soy. The spinning wheel is something he made from his own likeness; it was tall and as rough as any king that ever came to be. My man took no shelter from the rain. Under a meek gaslight he spun threads of three hundred and eighteen hues to buy the jewels I told him touched my soul one afternoon.

"They are only ever beautiful sitting on velvet, in a glass case. They are only gorgeous when they are out of my reach. You don't need to bring them to me," I say to him over hot tea.

"They are almost deserving of you," he says. "And they spoke to you, didn't they?"

I nodded. "Like the darkness does to whales,"

"And I to you,"

"Shall I be the cursed animal, then?"

"If you'd swallow me and all that I am," he says. "And it would be a dear of you if you don't spit me back out,"

My man reminds me of Cici before rot haunted her bones. My man knows that I would grant the same end to him, only that my reason is low and my means are few. My man knows I would sell him for a pack, or a stick, if I ever had the need. My man knows that I would have sold him for a puff before we came to the hills.

My man didn't make a living when we performed our word before the setting sun. He didn't know how to hum a melody and what it means to die. He was as precious as clear water gleaming in my hands, he was. He taught himself tricks of labor in three days and two nights. For me, and the home where we keep ourselves warm in. He never so much as frowns, but he cries when tears are due, and often he is laughing because of my innate talent to ridicule seasons of hurt.

I take a pack for myself, if not more, every day. It is to see the world a little bit better. The fumes sleeping in my throat help me stay awake when the soul I stole from Cici wants dreaming. A whole lot brighter the world becomes; the top of the hills are rounder from the plains of town, and the gaslights from each house glitters from mine.

I have burned my lungs away, but I will not make cash off of my man, not even for a puff. He laughs with an abandon I can never muster. He speaks with a calm I have stolen for myself. My man is beautiful through and through a hundred looking glasses. He is the master of the life I have only seen in the back of my eyes.

And so, he must go before I do. My man should meet the gods and tell them, "I loved her with all that I am," even if it is a lie. A lie will do just fine. Then, I shall make him savor the tears I saved. My man shall have for himself the widow who wept the loudest, the widow who said his name with her dying breath. My man shall live longer than I ever will; I will paint him in the minds of everyone I am bound to meet, be it in friendship or in passing. He is the most beautiful thing to ever happen to me.